A 17-year-old Miami student is trying to grow a tomato that tastes like a hamburger, and she is doing much of the work at the University of Miami with a graduate mentor.
Gabriella Rothberg, a senior at Ransom Everglades High School, is working with Maddison Marshall, a University of Miami PhD candidate, on a project called Impossible Vines. The team is trying to introduce genetic material that would let tomato plants produce heme, an iron-containing molecule that gives meat its flavor. The method uses Agrobacterium, a bacterium scientists often use to move genes into plants.
Rothberg, whose father helped pioneer next-generation DNA sequencing and whose mother is a physician and cancer researcher, said the idea started one afternoon when she was 15 and making a sandwich. Her plants grew more slowly than expected for months until the team found that the vitamin concentration in their growth medium was off. Once that was corrected, growth appeared within weeks.
Rothberg said she used artificial intelligence to help write a business plan, draft a patent and design the genetic constructs. A U.S. patent issued in June lists her and her father as inventors, with Impossible Vines Inc. as the assignee.
She said the technology could someday help people in places where meat is expensive or hard to get, including pregnant women in developing countries. Whether the tomatoes could supply meaningful amounts of absorbable iron, she said, depends on future testing. She also wants to raise the lycopene content of tomatoes, though research has not shown that eating more lycopene prevents cancer.
